{"id":187223,"date":"2018-10-27T23:20:40","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T03:20:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=187223"},"modified":"2018-10-27T23:20:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T03:20:40","slug":"government-closely-watching-public-opinion-asylum-seekers-documents-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/10\/27\/government-closely-watching-public-opinion-asylum-seekers-documents-show\/","title":{"rendered":"Government closely watching public opinion on asylum seekers, documents show"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
This monitoring includes internal polling conducted by the Immigration Department to track public opinion about asylum seekers. (File Photo<\/a>: Thomas Hawk\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY-NC 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

OTTAWA \u2014 The federal government has been closely monitoring public reaction to the influx of asylum seekers in\u00a0Canada\u00a0\u2014 regularly conducting national surveys and measuring discussions on social media.<\/p>\n

Documents released to The Canadian Press under
\naccess-to-information law show department officials receive weekly
\ninternal updates on media coverage and public response to issues
\nrelated to asylum seekers coming irregularly into the country across
\nthe\u00a0Canada-U.S. border.<\/p>\n

This monitoring includes internal polling conducted by the Immigration Department to track public opinion about asylum seekers.<\/p>\n

Two mid-year surveys of 2,000 Canadians, conducted by the department in March, suggested Canadians were not overly confident about\u00a0Canada’s ability to manage the border at unguarded points-of-entry and had little sense of obligation about accepting asylum seekers from the United States.<\/p>\n

Fewer than half of respondents \u2014 43 per cent in a telephone survey and 35 per cent in an online survey \u2014 agreed that\u00a0Canada\u00a0is taking appropriate steps to manage irregular border crossings.<\/p>\n

Forty-two per cent of telephone respondents and just 18 per cent of those online indicated they felt the number of people coming to\u00a0Canada\u00a0and claiming asylum was at an appropriate level.<\/p>\n

\u201cCanadians are more receptive to refugees who have been selected by the government of\u00a0Canada\u00a0compared to those who come to\u00a0Canada\u00a0and claim asylum,\u201d the internal document notes as one of its key takeaways from the public survey.<\/p>\n

The documents also show the Immigration Department closely measures public comment about asylum seekers on social media. This includes a weekly average of how many times the issue is mentioned every day.<\/p>\n

The government also measures the number of times media stories published about asylum seekers include \u201cmyths countering messaging.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also uses social media as a tool to disseminate information as part of its outreach efforts to discourage irregular migrants from coming to\u00a0Canada.<\/p>\n

A targeted advertising campaign using search engine marketing to reach key populations in the U.S. was launched on Dec. 18, 2017 and continued until March 17, 2018, which included \u201ctargeted messaging based on users’ search terms to users in select U.S. cities where larger temporary protected status populations are found,\u201d the internal document states.<\/p>\n

Canada\u00a0first began experiencing an influx of \u201cirregular\u201d border crossers in early 2017, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would end a program that offered temporary protected status to immigrants from several countries in the United States.<\/p>\n

Over 36,000 asylum seekers have since arrived in\u00a0Canada\u00a0from the U.S., avoiding official border checkpoints where they would have been turned back to the U.S. under the Safe Third Country agreement between the two countries. Instead, they have been crossing the border along forest paths and fields, declaring their intent to seek refugee status once on Canadian soil.<\/p>\n

The issue has sparked calls for\u00a0Canada\u00a0to suspend or amend the Safe Third Country Agreement as a way to stop the flow of irregular migrants.<\/p>\n

Border Security Minister Bill Blair points to the fact that there was not a major surge in the number of irregular border crossers apprehended by RCMP this summer compared to last summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur senior officials are working hard, they are working hard and they are managing the situation quite ably,\u201d Blair said Thursday.<\/p>\n

However, year-over-year numbers show that overall, more people have crossed irregularly into\u00a0Canada\u00a0so far this year compared to the number of individuals who crossed from January to September of 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OTTAWA \u2014 The federal government has been closely monitoring public reaction to the influx of asylum seekers in\u00a0Canada\u00a0\u2014 regularly conducting …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":177574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news-ca","category-news","mauthors-teresa-wright","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}